"Since the EPA does the testing and approves the mileage figures, doesn't this shield the manufacturers from liability for inflated numbers?"
And that is exactly what is wrong with government intervention in the marketplace, beyond contract enforcement and truth in advertising. The lying auto manufacturers can simply point to the government and say, "It's there numbers, not ours. We're indemnified." It would be better for consumers if auto manufacturers, or third party testers, published their own numbers. True, this wouldn't server the lowest common denominator of our society as well as government publishing the numbers. But, then again, maybe the lowest common denominator would creep upward because of that.
And you think that if the manufacturers could set the testing criteria that the numbers would be any more fair? At least with EPA numbers, all manufacturers have to follow the same standards. If the manufacturers did it, they'd all use their own methodology and you wouldn't be able to compare numbers between manufacturers.
If they used a third-party, each manufacturer would use the third party that gave them the best numbers.
Exactly! I can only speak for Prius since its the only hybrid I've owned, but the fuel economy has never been an issue. Battery life is well over 150,000 miles ( by other users notes ) also. Adding in the fact that belts are nearly extinct on the 2011 model engine and it's beautiful. This articles BS.
The lack of timing a timing belt is a big win and almost makes up for the cost of a battery pack.
On my conventionally powered car, I just had the timing belt (and water pump and a few other associated parts) replaced for $1600 (at 105K miles). The Prius has a timing chain instead of a belt.
My neighbor has 120K miles on his 2002 Prius and the battery is still fine.
If I had space to park two cars at my house, I'd have an electric one as a regular vehicle, but with certain transportation needs, I'm not able to find them in an electric vehicle yet and I can't afford the conversion costs.
If you live in a city, one option to having 2 cars might be to join a city car share program. If you rarely need the range of a gas powered engine, it could be a cost effective alternative to owning two cars. Plus you can choose the car that best meets your needs - take a sporty convertible for a weekend getaway with your wife, take a minivan on the long trip with the kids, take a pickup truck to the hardware store, etc.
My Prius displays real-time data (in an admittedly blah interface), so I know the efficiency at all times.
And I'm getting 53-56 MPG at the injector and 50-52 MPG at the pump (lower due to evaporation) on mostly highway commutes.
It simply works.
If you are losing 5% of your gas due to evaporation, you should have your fuel system checked. Modern cars use a sealed system that traps evaporated fuel in a carbon filter and sucks the vapor back through the engine the next time you run the car. Very little fuel should be lost to evaporation.
Since the EPA does the testing and approves the mileage figures, doesn't this shield the manufacturers from liability for inflated numbers? The EPA sets the testing criteria. I know that I never hit the estimated city mileage for my conventional car and never expected to, so I only use the published gas mileage numbers to see relative mileage between cars. I never thought I'd hit that number exactly.
That said, the Prius owners I know are quite happy with their 40mpg+ mileage and are close or even over the published mileage. Granted, it takes a difference in driving style to hit that number (for example, by maximizing regenerative braking), but most people that buy a Prius are willing to help it maximize their mileage.
Your telling me that winter tires are not mandatory in wintery states in the US?
Not only are they not mandatory, but in many states they are, in fact, illegal.
I think you're confusing winter tires with studded winter tires. Studded tires are banned in summer months (and non-snow states) because of the additional road wear they cause. I'm not aware of any restrictions on using rubber winter tires (or de-studded snow tires) in the summer.
Modern snow tires are better in almost all conditions than most studded snow tires without the drawbacks (poor wet traction, noise, road wear, etc). Unless driving in icy conditions frequently, it's probably best to avoid studs.
Your telling me that winter tires are not mandatory in wintery states in the US?! No wonder there are all kinds of crazy when a snow storm pops by. Here in Norway your required to have winter tires on after a specific date, and they need to have a minimum thread depth.
Nope, not mandatory at all in most areas, but I can't speak for the entire country. I've been on some mountain roads in California where they make sure you have at least all-season tires that are M+S (mud and snow) rated or they require snow chains, but all season tires are a poor substitute for quality winter tires. But I think the all kinds of crazy that happens during a winter storm is more due to poor driver skills than the tires they have on their cars - many people don't understand that just because their car will accelerate to 50km/hour on a snow covered city street, that doesn't mean that they will be able to negotiate the curve ahead at that same speed without sliding off the road.
Not even our northern-most state of Alaska requires snow tires in the winter:
Are you for real? And who modded you up and me down? Google is absolutely a monopoly in web search. It doesn't matter if I'm the "only one pushing it" on Slashdot (which isn't true).
A monopoly means more than just "has a lot of market share". Try reading up on it before you start throwing it around.
Monopoly means "the exclusive possession or control of the supply or trade in a commodity or service." Google is the dominant search engine as well as the dominant web advertiser. It is most definitely a monopoly. But if you and the moderators don't believe me, how about the words of Eric Schmidt, who said in response to the question of whether Google is in a position that would subject it to monopoly rules: "We're in that area."
They're a monopoly.
Google has only 65% of the market share. That hardly sounds like a monopoly. Sure, they are the dominant player, but there are alternatives and switching to a different search provider has little friction, it's not like changing operating systems.
In comparison, Microsoft owns 80 - 90% of the operating system market (based on web client statistics)
Flamebait, I know. But if they payload is you (and I'll generously give you 300 lbs for yourself and your laptop) and the vessel weighs 15 times that much. A total waste.
Fuel efficiency isn't the only design criteria for modern cars.
Of course, if safety is what you want, your argument could be used to recommend putting mandatory speed governors on every car. If the fastest speed limit in the nation is 75mph, why do we have cars that can go 108mph?
If the weekend racers want to go 100mph on the track, let them buy a special license plate with the key to unlock their speed governor. If they are caught speeding on a public street (or if anyone else has tampered with the speed governor), then give them mandatory jail time.
Yeah. Its not that hard.. I mean, your little 5 seconds of thought couldn't possibly be gamed or circumvented by anyone. Definitely doesn't implicitly tax others, either. Shit, you spent 5 whole fucking seconds coming up with the idea! Its rock solid!
Those fobs.. those are totally secure! Nobody could crack those, and certainly nobody would use them when buying fuel for passenger vehicles. "butbut! they'll be filling a passenger vehicle! it'll be obvious" sure.. and that would eliminate, entirely, the advantage of having little fobs to automate the rebate process because you'll need a live human doing verification.
And the costs of keeping up with all the extra bookkeeping that your plan entails.. that cost just gets eaten by the fuel stop owners. Or they pass it on to their customers. All of them. On the government end of things, they'll need more bureaucracy to keep track of all the stuff and audit the crap, so we'll need to pay for that too. Great! Just raise the fuel taxes more, so we can cover the compliance costs and the externalities.
Not so bright and cheery and easy now is it, and I spent a whole 30 seconds considering your brilliant not hard plan to save us all.
Non-taxed fuel is readily available for those that don't use it for cars (farmers, on-site industrial use, etc). And yes, abuse does happen, but abusers are regularly caught using dyed fuel in on-road vehicles, and the penalties are substantial enough to keep it from being a huge problem. But giving a rebate at the pump doesn't seem like the way to go.
Commercial drivers already track their fuel usage as a business expense. Having them apply for a tax-rebate for fuel use doesn't seem like it would add much administrative expense.
Just because some of us drive larger vehicles doesn't mean we should be the only ones to pay higher taxes. We already suffer when we fill the tank up. In my case I have no choice but to drive a large family vehicle because they don't make fuel efficient vehicles for large families, therefore my family suffers more at the pump than you.
Why should society grant you special tax breaks just because you've decided to have a large family? You're already getting a break on your federal taxes, now you want a break on your fuel tax?
It costs you more to move your big family because you have a big family - big families are expensive.
You're not being singled out for this tax - everyone that uses a gas/diesel fueled vehicle will pay it. It's just that you'll pay more because you use more.
You don't say how large your family is, but check out the Mazda5 - 22/27 mpg is pretty good for a 7 passenger vehicle. It gets better gas mileage than my 10 year old 4 passenger car. (if I drove more I'd get something more fuel efficient, but I don't drive much so there's no point in taking on a $400/month car payment to save $10/month in gas)
The increase in gas prices hasn't drastically changed what vehicles we buy. Many of those that really would rather buy more efficient vehicles can't afford them, and are stuck with older ones, so the economists would just be hurting the poor.
As consumers shouldn't we choose what vehicle economies we use? Where I live, SUVs are all over. But, it makes more sense. Adverse conditions favor SUVs. An economist, you would think, would say people buy what they want.
Few people really *need* a 4WD SUV or even an AWD car.
When I lived in the northeast, I commuted entirely with a front wheel drive car. I put on snow tires in the winter, and never got stuck (or in a winter time accident). For 3 winters, I moonlighted as a snow-plow driver for a local business, so part of my commute meant driving in conditions that many people stayed home in (and I regularly saw 4WD vehicles that had run off the road). As long as the roads had less than 8 inches of snow, I was good to go - beyond that I'd need more ground clearance than my car provided. I did resort to chains on a few icy days.
Smart driving and snow tires are much better than blind trust in an SUV. And unfortunately, many SUV drivers do appear to use that blind trust rather than good driving skills.
4 wheel drive (or AWD) only helps you move forward, you already have 4 wheel braking, and for most of us, it's the braking that's more important when driving in adverse conditions.
Now it's possible that you have a need to travel on unmaintained roads to your cabin in the woods, for that I'll grant you that an SUV may be helpful (but not infallible, get a Sno-cat if you *have* to get somewhere in the snow)
One thing I've learned from cyclists is that they know so much more than we do. That's why, for instance, in Oregon there was a large effort to pass a law making it so that cyclists don't have to obey traffic stops -- their judgment about if they need to stop at intersections render stop lights and signs superfluous for them, and waste their time. I am quite sure she'll not only succeed, but have many great lessons to teach the people at stations near the south pole before they strap her to an iceberg and push her out to sea.
Really? I hadn't heard about that, that sounds like an excellent law.
You trust car drivers, who are in a closed, partially sound proof box with large vertical obstructions in their field of view to be able to make that judgement when their car hood keeps them 4 - 5 feet behind the intersection, but you don't trust a cyclist who has a clear field of view and sense of hearing who is 18" from the intersection when he approaches to make the same decision?
Often when I'm biking to an intersection, a car will pass me in the last 5 or 10 feet to the intersection, slow down, and proceed through the intersection before I even reach the stopping point. Did that driver really look carefully to decide if it was safe to go? If he did, then why do you think that I couldn't make that same decision in the same amount of time,even if I don't come to a complete stop? Plus, by not coming to a complete stop and unclipping from my pedals, I get through the intersection faster, so the approaching car from the side doesn't need to wait as long for me to clear it.
A bike loses significant momentum when he comes to a full stop, and loses further time when he has to clip in again to proceed, *and* he has much more to lose if he makes the wrong judgement - if a car pulls out in front of a cyclist, the worst he'll face is some scratched paint. If a cyclist misjudges and pulls out in front of a car, he risks serious injury or death.
Just a casual look at the picture of the bike makes me really wonder about the chain and sprockets on the back. They are totally exposed, and very low to the ground. Seems like they would be damaged on a chunk of ice pretty quickly.
Sometimes ease of accessibility trumps protection. Once on a bike tour, my riding partner snapped her chain and the loose chain got hung up in her chain guard. Normally a broken chain would be a 5 minute fix, we had a chain tool and some spare links. But it turns out that her chain cover screws were completely rusted tight - we stripped the screw heads trying to get them off.
Fortunately, a passing motorist had a hacksaw so we just cut off the chain guard mounts, then it was an easy fix after that.
For the snow bike, they may have decided that the extra weight and complexity of a chain guard that could cover a derailleur shifted chain wasn't worth it, and valued quick access to the chain over protection. It's already a 40lb bike.
The retrieval of this data has been authorized by the vehicle's owner, or other legal authority such as a subpoena or search warrant...
I think the OP's point was that insurance companies could require access to the black box data as a part of an insurance policy. There are no clear laws over who owns the data and who can access it:
What's not clear in this case is if the police had to request permission from Murray to access the data, or if they only had to have permission to release the data.
I can see the insurance companies now: "Sorry Mr. Smith, but the speed limit is 60 and you were travelling at 61 so we are denying your claim."
No insurance policy that I'm aware of excludes coverage if you're speeing. I'm not even sure that's legal.
Insurance will also cover you if you're committing a felony DUI or driving recklessly.
They may cancel your policy afterwards and refuse to write you a new policy, but they won't refuse to cover you just because you were going over the speed limit at the time of the accident.
So G is short for "G-force" - well what's that short for? That's certainly not a unit of measure, but a scale. Anyway, "Big G" is a universal constant. You're probably thinking of small g, often used as a measure of acceleration, representing the acceleration due to gravity at earth's surface. And as 99.9999998% of us have only ever experienced this one gravity well, it's usually not considered necessary to say "Earth surface gravities" and so "gravities" is a perfectly acceptable synonym for this (somewhat vague) unit of measure, the symbol for which would be "g" (NOT "G").
Since accident investigators and car companies so rarely need to use the Gravitational Constant in their calculations (not even a Hummer is large enough to have gravitational attraction be a factor in an accident), it's perfectly acceptable for them to represent g as G as there's no ambiguity in their field. And it even helps to distinguish between g as in gravitational acceleration and g as in gram.
Or you could, you know, drive responsibly and treat your car like the potential deadly weapon that it is. So when the insurance company looks at the black box data, it matches your story.
As long as the data is read by an independent third party and made available to the driver (and his lawyer), the black box data shouldn't be something to fear.
Sounds like a lot of effort to crunch far more data than you really need to render on the ceiling. An HDMI cable can manage up to 8,847,360 pixels; at 36 LEDs per square foot (even assuming these LEDs do full colour) that's 245,000 square feet of office. All you need is a controller to interpret an HDMI signal and distribute it to those LEDs, and a home computer.
I think the idea is to purchase relatively cheap off the shelf TV's instead of paying $1500/square meter for these LED panels. You can buy a cheap 50" LCD TV (around.6 square meter display size) for around $500, or $833/square meter
I don't think creating a controller that takes in an HDMI signal and fans it out to 8 million LED's would help with the cost of the LED solution much. Once you work out the mechanism to control the LED's, you may as well just have your computer control the LED's directly rather than outputting as HDMI first.
It's likely that the mounting, power, and cooling demands of using off the shelf TV's would make them unfeasible compared to the LED panels, even if the LED panels cost twice as much.
"It's nothing like the jump from black-and-white to color, or even the jump from my old 19" Trinitron TV circa 1993 years ago to a flat panel display."
I never knew they had this model of TV back in the year, 19 AD... Well, I guess Jesus missed it too.
The prime and double prime marks are very commonly used to represent feet and inches. The prime and double prime in turn are very commonly represented by apostrophe and quotation marks.
I think the problem is that 3D movies and TV are not really "3D", they are 2D movies using a stereoscopic effect that can fool the brain into thinking that the picture has depth. But it's not really 3D, which results in headaches and other effects that make it uncomfortable for many people.
If they could come out with a holoscopic projection mechanism that shows true 3D, maybe then people will be more interested, but high quality full-color holoscopic projection is probably decades away, if ever.
Even in a galaxy far, far away, the holographic projections created by R2-series droids have flickering low-quality images.
Professors are not allowed to collect royalties for books sold at the same college where they teach.
As an academic librarian, I can say with absolute certainty that this is only true at a handful of universities, and is nearly impossible to enforce.
And often not the best idea - sometimes the book that the professor wrote is the best book (why would he write it if he didn't feel that it was the best?).
In one class where the professor wrote the book, he told the class to buy a used older edition if possible since the updates in the latest edition were minor, and when he handed out assignments, he gave page numbers for both the new and old edition. And he handed out photocopies of a new diagram that weren't present in the old edition.
No professor is going to get rich off the royalties by selling to his students. If he wanted to make money from his students, instead of publishing a book, he'd keep it private and print copies for his class and sell them for $50/copy (keeping all of the profit) instead of the publisher selling it for $150 and giving the professor $5/copy in royalties.
You could just buy TVs cheaper than that. Hook them up to a computer to control the displays, and you have the exact same thing, without any specialized hardware. Power usage would probably be quite a bit higher, but as price of TVs come down, the price of replacing the panels would get quite a bit cheaper. Mind you, at only $60,000, that's less than the cost of hiring one worker. If you get a measurable productvity increase out this, it might actually be cheaper to do this than to hire 1 new person.
Monitors sound like a good idea for a cheaper solution than these expensive panels, but If you want clouds to flow from monitor to monitor, you'll need a large "Video Wall" controller so you can paint a coherent sky picture with clouds that flow from monitor to monitor. And large controllers are not cheap (and probably don't scale well to cover an entire office ceiling).
You're probably going to be better off with a small computer driving each monitor that talks to its neighbor to carry the clouds over and doing some random transforms on the clouds so they change shape as they flow across the ceiling.
Slashdot Mirror
"Since the EPA does the testing and approves the mileage figures, doesn't this shield the manufacturers from liability for inflated numbers?"
And that is exactly what is wrong with government intervention in the marketplace, beyond contract enforcement and truth in advertising. The lying auto manufacturers can simply point to the government and say, "It's there numbers, not ours. We're indemnified." It would be better for consumers if auto manufacturers, or third party testers, published their own numbers. True, this wouldn't server the lowest common denominator of our society as well as government publishing the numbers. But, then again, maybe the lowest common denominator would creep upward because of that.
And you think that if the manufacturers could set the testing criteria that the numbers would be any more fair? At least with EPA numbers, all manufacturers have to follow the same standards. If the manufacturers did it, they'd all use their own methodology and you wouldn't be able to compare numbers between manufacturers.
If they used a third-party, each manufacturer would use the third party that gave them the best numbers.
Uh, yeah. But you can get the same in a non-hybrid coasting down as well...
But a conventional car doesn't regenerate gas in the tank on downhills to help you get over the next hill, while a hybrid will recharge the battery.
I'd have an electric one as a regular vehicle
Better yet, buy a bicycle!
A bike is not always practical. Try commuting from Oakland to San Francisco on your bike (you can't take it on BART during commute hours).
Exactly!
I can only speak for Prius since its the only hybrid I've owned, but the fuel economy has never been an issue. Battery life is well over 150,000 miles ( by other users notes ) also. Adding in the fact that belts are nearly extinct on the 2011 model engine and it's beautiful. This articles BS.
The lack of timing a timing belt is a big win and almost makes up for the cost of a battery pack.
On my conventionally powered car, I just had the timing belt (and water pump and a few other associated parts) replaced for $1600 (at 105K miles). The Prius has a timing chain instead of a belt.
My neighbor has 120K miles on his 2002 Prius and the battery is still fine.
>
If I had space to park two cars at my house, I'd have an electric one as a regular vehicle, but with certain transportation needs, I'm not able to find them in an electric vehicle yet and I can't afford the conversion costs.
If you live in a city, one option to having 2 cars might be to join a city car share program. If you rarely need the range of a gas powered engine, it could be a cost effective alternative to owning two cars. Plus you can choose the car that best meets your needs - take a sporty convertible for a weekend getaway with your wife, take a minivan on the long trip with the kids, take a pickup truck to the hardware store, etc.
http://www.zipcar.com/
http://www.citycarshare.org/
My Prius displays real-time data (in an admittedly blah interface), so I know the efficiency at all times.
And I'm getting 53-56 MPG at the injector and 50-52 MPG at the pump (lower due to evaporation) on mostly highway commutes.
It simply works.
If you are losing 5% of your gas due to evaporation, you should have your fuel system checked. Modern cars use a sealed system that traps evaporated fuel in a carbon filter and sucks the vapor back through the engine the next time you run the car. Very little fuel should be lost to evaporation.
Since the EPA does the testing and approves the mileage figures, doesn't this shield the manufacturers from liability for inflated numbers? The EPA sets the testing criteria. I know that I never hit the estimated city mileage for my conventional car and never expected to, so I only use the published gas mileage numbers to see relative mileage between cars. I never thought I'd hit that number exactly.
That said, the Prius owners I know are quite happy with their 40mpg+ mileage and are close or even over the published mileage. Granted, it takes a difference in driving style to hit that number (for example, by maximizing regenerative braking), but most people that buy a Prius are willing to help it maximize their mileage.
Your telling me that winter tires are not mandatory in wintery states in the US?
Not only are they not mandatory, but in many states they are, in fact, illegal.
I think you're confusing winter tires with studded winter tires. Studded tires are banned in summer months (and non-snow states) because of the additional road wear they cause. I'm not aware of any restrictions on using rubber winter tires (or de-studded snow tires) in the summer.
Modern snow tires are better in almost all conditions than most studded snow tires without the drawbacks (poor wet traction, noise, road wear, etc). Unless driving in icy conditions frequently, it's probably best to avoid studs.
Your telling me that winter tires are not mandatory in wintery states in the US?! No wonder there are all kinds of crazy when a snow storm pops by. Here in Norway your required to have winter tires on after a specific date, and they need to have a minimum thread depth.
Nope, not mandatory at all in most areas, but I can't speak for the entire country. I've been on some mountain roads in California where they make sure you have at least all-season tires that are M+S (mud and snow) rated or they require snow chains, but all season tires are a poor substitute for quality winter tires. But I think the all kinds of crazy that happens during a winter storm is more due to poor driver skills than the tires they have on their cars - many people don't understand that just because their car will accelerate to 50km/hour on a snow covered city street, that doesn't mean that they will be able to negotiate the curve ahead at that same speed without sliding off the road.
Not even our northern-most state of Alaska requires snow tires in the winter:
http://newsminer.com/view/full_story/6376818/article-Alaska-Legislature-considers-making-snow-tires-mandatory?instance=home_news_window_left_top_2
Are you for real? And who modded you up and me down? Google is absolutely a monopoly in web search. It doesn't matter if I'm the "only one pushing it" on Slashdot (which isn't true).
Monopoly means "the exclusive possession or control of the supply or trade in a commodity or service." Google is the dominant search engine as well as the dominant web advertiser. It is most definitely a monopoly. But if you and the moderators don't believe me, how about the words of Eric Schmidt, who said in response to the question of whether Google is in a position that would subject it to monopoly rules: "We're in that area."
They're a monopoly.
Google has only 65% of the market share. That hardly sounds like a monopoly. Sure, they are the dominant player, but there are alternatives and switching to a different search provider has little friction, it's not like changing operating systems.
In comparison, Microsoft owns 80 - 90% of the operating system market (based on web client statistics)
Flamebait, I know. But if they payload is you (and I'll generously give you 300 lbs for yourself and your laptop) and the vessel weighs 15 times that much. A total waste.
Earlier today, we had a story on how the Massachusetts Lt. Governor crashed his Crown Vic doing 108mph and walked away with no injuries. Say what you will about the Lt Governor, it is not really a waste when crash survival rates increase dramatically.
Fuel efficiency isn't the only design criteria for modern cars.
Of course, if safety is what you want, your argument could be used to recommend putting mandatory speed governors on every car. If the fastest speed limit in the nation is 75mph, why do we have cars that can go 108mph?
If the weekend racers want to go 100mph on the track, let them buy a special license plate with the key to unlock their speed governor. If they are caught speeding on a public street (or if anyone else has tampered with the speed governor), then give them mandatory jail time.
Yeah. Its not that hard.. I mean, your little 5 seconds of thought couldn't possibly be gamed or circumvented by anyone. Definitely doesn't implicitly tax others, either. Shit, you spent 5 whole fucking seconds coming up with the idea! Its rock solid!
Those fobs.. those are totally secure! Nobody could crack those, and certainly nobody would use them when buying fuel for passenger vehicles. "butbut! they'll be filling a passenger vehicle! it'll be obvious" sure.. and that would eliminate, entirely, the advantage of having little fobs to automate the rebate process because you'll need a live human doing verification.
And the costs of keeping up with all the extra bookkeeping that your plan entails.. that cost just gets eaten by the fuel stop owners. Or they pass it on to their customers. All of them. On the government end of things, they'll need more bureaucracy to keep track of all the stuff and audit the crap, so we'll need to pay for that too. Great! Just raise the fuel taxes more, so we can cover the compliance costs and the externalities.
Not so bright and cheery and easy now is it, and I spent a whole 30 seconds considering your brilliant not hard plan to save us all.
Non-taxed fuel is readily available for those that don't use it for cars (farmers, on-site industrial use, etc). And yes, abuse does happen, but abusers are regularly caught using dyed fuel in on-road vehicles, and the penalties are substantial enough to keep it from being a huge problem. But giving a rebate at the pump doesn't seem like the way to go.
Commercial drivers already track their fuel usage as a business expense. Having them apply for a tax-rebate for fuel use doesn't seem like it would add much administrative expense.
Just because some of us drive larger vehicles doesn't mean we should be the only ones to pay higher taxes. We already suffer when we fill the tank up. In my case I have no choice but to drive a large family vehicle because they don't make fuel efficient vehicles for large families, therefore my family suffers more at the pump than you.
Why should society grant you special tax breaks just because you've decided to have a large family? You're already getting a break on your federal taxes, now you want a break on your fuel tax?
It costs you more to move your big family because you have a big family - big families are expensive.
You're not being singled out for this tax - everyone that uses a gas/diesel fueled vehicle will pay it. It's just that you'll pay more because you use more.
You don't say how large your family is, but check out the Mazda5 - 22/27 mpg is pretty good for a 7 passenger vehicle. It gets better gas mileage than my 10 year old 4 passenger car. (if I drove more I'd get something more fuel efficient, but I don't drive much so there's no point in taking on a $400/month car payment to save $10/month in gas)
The increase in gas prices hasn't drastically changed what vehicles we buy. Many of those that really would rather buy more efficient vehicles can't afford them, and are stuck with older ones, so the economists would just be hurting the poor.
As consumers shouldn't we choose what vehicle economies we use? Where I live, SUVs are all over. But, it makes more sense. Adverse conditions favor SUVs. An economist, you would think, would say people buy what they want.
Few people really *need* a 4WD SUV or even an AWD car.
When I lived in the northeast, I commuted entirely with a front wheel drive car. I put on snow tires in the winter, and never got stuck (or in a winter time accident). For 3 winters, I moonlighted as a snow-plow driver for a local business, so part of my commute meant driving in conditions that many people stayed home in (and I regularly saw 4WD vehicles that had run off the road). As long as the roads had less than 8 inches of snow, I was good to go - beyond that I'd need more ground clearance than my car provided. I did resort to chains on a few icy days.
Smart driving and snow tires are much better than blind trust in an SUV. And unfortunately, many SUV drivers do appear to use that blind trust rather than good driving skills.
4 wheel drive (or AWD) only helps you move forward, you already have 4 wheel braking, and for most of us, it's the braking that's more important when driving in adverse conditions.
Now it's possible that you have a need to travel on unmaintained roads to your cabin in the woods, for that I'll grant you that an SUV may be helpful (but not infallible, get a Sno-cat if you *have* to get somewhere in the snow)
One thing I've learned from cyclists is that they know so much more than we do. That's why, for instance, in Oregon there was a large effort to pass a law making it so that cyclists don't have to obey traffic stops -- their judgment about if they need to stop at intersections render stop lights and signs superfluous for them, and waste their time. I am quite sure she'll not only succeed, but have many great lessons to teach the people at stations near the south pole before they strap her to an iceberg and push her out to sea.
Really? I hadn't heard about that, that sounds like an excellent law.
You trust car drivers, who are in a closed, partially sound proof box with large vertical obstructions in their field of view to be able to make that judgement when their car hood keeps them 4 - 5 feet behind the intersection, but you don't trust a cyclist who has a clear field of view and sense of hearing who is 18" from the intersection when he approaches to make the same decision?
Often when I'm biking to an intersection, a car will pass me in the last 5 or 10 feet to the intersection, slow down, and proceed through the intersection before I even reach the stopping point. Did that driver really look carefully to decide if it was safe to go? If he did, then why do you think that I couldn't make that same decision in the same amount of time,even if I don't come to a complete stop? Plus, by not coming to a complete stop and unclipping from my pedals, I get through the intersection faster, so the approaching car from the side doesn't need to wait as long for me to clear it.
A bike loses significant momentum when he comes to a full stop, and loses further time when he has to clip in again to proceed, *and* he has much more to lose if he makes the wrong judgement - if a car pulls out in front of a cyclist, the worst he'll face is some scratched paint. If a cyclist misjudges and pulls out in front of a car, he risks serious injury or death.
Just a casual look at the picture of the bike makes me really wonder about the chain and sprockets on the back. They are totally exposed, and very low to the ground. Seems like they would be damaged on a chunk of ice pretty quickly.
Sometimes ease of accessibility trumps protection. Once on a bike tour, my riding partner snapped her chain and the loose chain got hung up in her chain guard. Normally a broken chain would be a 5 minute fix, we had a chain tool and some spare links. But it turns out that her chain cover screws were completely rusted tight - we stripped the screw heads trying to get them off.
Fortunately, a passing motorist had a hacksaw so we just cut off the chain guard mounts, then it was an easy fix after that.
For the snow bike, they may have decided that the extra weight and complexity of a chain guard that could cover a derailleur shifted chain wasn't worth it, and valued quick access to the chain over protection. It's already a 40lb bike.
Our, you know, OP could RTFM:
The retrieval of this data has been authorized by the vehicle's owner, or other legal authority such as a subpoena or search warrant...
I think the OP's point was that insurance companies could require access to the black box data as a part of an insurance policy. There are no clear laws over who owns the data and who can access it:
http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2006/02/black_boxes_states.html
What's not clear in this case is if the police had to request permission from Murray to access the data, or if they only had to have permission to release the data.
I can see the insurance companies now: "Sorry Mr. Smith, but the speed limit is 60 and you were travelling at 61 so we are denying your claim."
No insurance policy that I'm aware of excludes coverage if you're speeing. I'm not even sure that's legal.
Insurance will also cover you if you're committing a felony DUI or driving recklessly.
They may cancel your policy afterwards and refuse to write you a new policy, but they won't refuse to cover you just because you were going over the speed limit at the time of the accident.
*headdesk*
So G is short for "G-force" - well what's that short for? That's certainly not a unit of measure, but a scale. Anyway, "Big G" is a universal constant. You're probably thinking of small g, often used as a measure of acceleration, representing the acceleration due to gravity at earth's surface. And as 99.9999998% of us have only ever experienced this one gravity well, it's usually not considered necessary to say "Earth surface gravities" and so "gravities" is a perfectly acceptable synonym for this (somewhat vague) unit of measure, the symbol for which would be "g" (NOT "G").
Since accident investigators and car companies so rarely need to use the Gravitational Constant in their calculations (not even a Hummer is large enough to have gravitational attraction be a factor in an accident), it's perfectly acceptable for them to represent g as G as there's no ambiguity in their field. And it even helps to distinguish between g as in gravitational acceleration and g as in gram.
Or you could, you know, drive responsibly and treat your car like the potential deadly weapon that it is. So when the insurance company looks at the black box data, it matches your story.
As long as the data is read by an independent third party and made available to the driver (and his lawyer), the black box data shouldn't be something to fear.
Sounds like a lot of effort to crunch far more data than you really need to render on the ceiling. An HDMI cable can manage up to 8,847,360 pixels; at 36 LEDs per square foot (even assuming these LEDs do full colour) that's 245,000 square feet of office. All you need is a controller to interpret an HDMI signal and distribute it to those LEDs, and a home computer.
I think the idea is to purchase relatively cheap off the shelf TV's instead of paying $1500/square meter for these LED panels. You can buy a cheap 50" LCD TV (around .6 square meter display size) for around $500, or $833/square meter
I don't think creating a controller that takes in an HDMI signal and fans it out to 8 million LED's would help with the cost of the LED solution much. Once you work out the mechanism to control the LED's, you may as well just have your computer control the LED's directly rather than outputting as HDMI first.
It's likely that the mounting, power, and cooling demands of using off the shelf TV's would make them unfeasible compared to the LED panels, even if the LED panels cost twice as much.
To quote:
"It's nothing like the jump from black-and-white to color, or even the jump from my old 19" Trinitron TV circa 1993 years ago to a flat panel display."
I never knew they had this model of TV back in the year, 19 AD... Well, I guess Jesus missed it too.
The prime and double prime marks are very commonly used to represent feet and inches. The prime and double prime in turn are very commonly represented by apostrophe and quotation marks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#Non-language_related_usage
I think the problem is that 3D movies and TV are not really "3D", they are 2D movies using a stereoscopic effect that can fool the brain into thinking that the picture has depth. But it's not really 3D, which results in headaches and other effects that make it uncomfortable for many people.
If they could come out with a holoscopic projection mechanism that shows true 3D, maybe then people will be more interested, but high quality full-color holoscopic projection is probably decades away, if ever.
Even in a galaxy far, far away, the holographic projections created by R2-series droids have flickering low-quality images.
Professors are not allowed to collect royalties for books sold at the same college where they teach.
As an academic librarian, I can say with absolute certainty that this is only true at a handful of universities, and is nearly impossible to enforce.
And often not the best idea - sometimes the book that the professor wrote is the best book (why would he write it if he didn't feel that it was the best?).
In one class where the professor wrote the book, he told the class to buy a used older edition if possible since the updates in the latest edition were minor, and when he handed out assignments, he gave page numbers for both the new and old edition. And he handed out photocopies of a new diagram that weren't present in the old edition.
No professor is going to get rich off the royalties by selling to his students. If he wanted to make money from his students, instead of publishing a book, he'd keep it private and print copies for his class and sell them for $50/copy (keeping all of the profit) instead of the publisher selling it for $150 and giving the professor $5/copy in royalties.
You could just buy TVs cheaper than that. Hook them up to a computer to control the displays, and you have the exact same thing, without any specialized hardware. Power usage would probably be quite a bit higher, but as price of TVs come down, the price of replacing the panels would get quite a bit cheaper. Mind you, at only $60,000, that's less than the cost of hiring one worker. If you get a measurable productvity increase out this, it might actually be cheaper to do this than to hire 1 new person.
Monitors sound like a good idea for a cheaper solution than these expensive panels, but If you want clouds to flow from monitor to monitor, you'll need a large "Video Wall" controller so you can paint a coherent sky picture with clouds that flow from monitor to monitor. And large controllers are not cheap (and probably don't scale well to cover an entire office ceiling).
You're probably going to be better off with a small computer driving each monitor that talks to its neighbor to carry the clouds over and doing some random transforms on the clouds so they change shape as they flow across the ceiling.
Sounds like a fun grad student project.